Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?" video.

  1. A video about secular variation of the earth’s magnetic field would be fascinating. Polar flip is extremely unlikely to happen without a preceding weak magnetic field, and there are no indications that the field is experiencing any significant weakening. You’d want to see a long term weakening of the field before making a prediction. A large impact could cause a much faster pole reversal, but now you’re talking about an event that would cause civilization collapse well before a polar flip caused problems. It’s low low low low probability that we would see a civilization ending chron (flip) in our lifetimes. But let’s say we did. What do you suspect might happen? Would electric motors turn in the opposite direction, like they do in Australia?
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  2. Interesting avenue of speculation. First of all, the industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened as you note. Without the Industrial Revolution, you still have slavery. You have less trade because you have fewer trade goods (because they are not being mass produced in factories). With less trade, there is less impetus to develop fiat currencies. Consequently, economic development is effectively capped. You would still see the development of science, I think. The Scientific Revolution preceded the Industrial Revolution and arguably triggered it. However, the Industrial Revolution provided resources and motivation for ongoing development of science (changing it from an upper class pursuit into something much broader. Interestingly, before either revolution, humanity knew how to use wind and hydro power to do mechanical work. We understood the principle that steam could do mechanical work. So we had some of the elements of an Industrial Revolution, but in our scenario, we lack the seemingly cheap power of fossil fuels (I say “seemingly” because today we understand that fossil fuels have high external costs.) I contend that the main impetus behind the development of civilization is work (in the physics sense, if you like)—the person who commands the most work gains the most power. In a slave based society, the person with the most slaves can become the most powerful. Resources are a close second in importance—the slaves need something with which to work: farmland, mining, impressive monuments. Both of these needs will lead to expansionism and war. Those that are best at war will become the most powerful. The result will be a constant state of war between groups, with occasional and temporary consolidations into centralized civilizations that control large numbers of slaves and large areas of land. I don’t know how you get past this stage without a cheap source of power to do work.
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  3. Accelerationists are essentially lazy people who want a quick fix. They think that they can solve problems with complete destruction of society, and their chief problem is that they don’t have power over other people. If you look at almost every revolution, you see the new bosses are just like the old bosses, or possibly worse. Some revolutionaries might be idealists, but the motivating force is ambition for power over others, regardless of ideology. Violence and social collapse is the shortcut used (or at least desired) for lazy sociopaths, regardless of ideology. Both the “lazy” and the “sociopath” are important here. If they were hardworking sociopath, they’d work within the system to gain power. The lazy sociopath is, above all, intellectually lazy to the point of criminality. However, what you are seeing in U.S. politics is a movement that has formed around criminality (and it’s not the first time—we even have names for it, i.e., fascism). The ideology of this movement forms itself to justify, conceal, and normalize the criminal mentality, which is why it is both incoherent and seductive to the merely lazy.
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